1. Field
The present invention relates to the field of cloud computing, and more particularly, the invention relates to systems and methods for securing, controlling and managing cloud services, applications, platforms and infrastructure.
2. Description of the Related Art
Companies have begun offering businesses a new cloud computing outsourcing option that promises reduced costs, improved availability, improved scalability, and reduced time to deploy new applications. These companies act as managed service providers that rent virtual computer, storage, and Internet connectivity services for variable periods on a pay-per-use basis from large pools of re-purposable. multi-tenant computing resources. Such cloud infrastructure providers include Amazon Web Services.®., Amazon EC2.®., GoGrid.®., Joyent.®., and Mosso.®.
Many businesses, however, are currently unable to use cloud infrastructure because of a lack of security, control, and manageability of the computing capacity rented from the cloud infrastructure providers. These problems prevent such businesses from maximizing their use of cloud infrastructure, which includes virtual server instances, storage, and Internet bandwidth. Enterprises also have difficulty identifying what cloud resources they should use, and how they should use them, such that usage is consistent with the technical, operational, and business needs of the enterprise.